At present the industry trend is to provide for greater memory capacity in a reduced form factor at a lower cost with a lower energy consumption. This trend is driven by the increased demand for portable, lap top, notebook and palm top computer configurations which can be easily transported to a desired work site. The desired memory configuration would include, for example, a magnetic or optical hard disk drive as such drives store a considerably higher amount of data than a floppy disk drive and can access that data at a rate substantially in excess of that of a floppy disk drive.
With respect to hard disk drives, there are two major types. The first is a hard disk drive with the memory media or magnetic disk permanently fixed therein. The second is a hard disk drive which can accept interchangeable and removable cartridges containing the memory media.
The removable cartridge hard disk drives have several significant advantages over the fixed disk hard disk drives. These include the ability to interchange the number of cartridges and thus provide the disk drive with an infinitely large memory capacity. A second advantage is that any information stored on the disk or the memory media in the cartridge can, along with the cartridge, be removed and placed in a secure location should the information be of a confidential or secret nature. This can be accomplished without having to store the computer or the disk drive itself. Additionally, large amounts of data can be transferred between computers and locations by removing the cartridge from one computer and transporting it to a second computer at a different location. Such portability of large amounts of information stored on cartridges has become more necessary, for example, due to the data requirement for graphic presentations.